Author Archives: Wendy Lyon

On International Day to Decriminalise Abortion

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

This afternoon, for (I believe) the first time, the pro-choice movement in Ireland will mark the International Day for Decriminalisation of Abortion with a rally and march through Dublin city centre. It will begin at 2pm at the Spire on O’Connell Street and march to Merrion Square. I will be marching with the Choice Ireland contingent, and hope to see you Irish readers there.

I have reservations about the “Decriminalise Abortion” slogan. To decriminalise something means only the removal of criminal penalties for it; it does not mean that it becomes available, accessible or affordable. We can see this in the United States, where 40 years after Roe vs Wade decriminalised (most) abortions, access is still blocked for many women due to cost, burdensome conditions or simple lack of a provider in their area. If Ireland’s Offences Against the Person Act 1861 was repealed tomorrow, I doubt it would make much difference to the farmer’s daughter in County Leitrim, or to the asylum seeker in Waterford getting €19 a week.

That said, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that Decriminalisation Day was initiated by women in the Global South, not Ireland. I’m certainly not telling them how to campaign in their own part of the world. And there are tragic cases, like that of Rosa Hernandez in the Dominican Republic, where decriminalisation alone really might have made a difference. In no way do I wish to undermine the efforts of women fighting to prevent Rosa’s story repeating itself.

But abortion is a woman’s right, and we must be clear that it is a positive right to which we are entitled and not merely something that the law should not prohibit. Decriminalise it, of course. But let there be no mistaking that for our objective.

On a final note, I’d like to thank Youth Defence for their appalling recent billboard campaign, which has galvanised the Irish pro-choice movement like nothing in the past 20 years. Undoubtedly they’ll undercount our numbers this afternoon and proclaim our march much smaller than the last one they held. And it probably will be smaller than theirs. But the important thing is that ten years or even five years ago, there would have been half as many of us and twice as many of them. Those are the numbers that matter – and don’t think for a moment they don’t know it.

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Posted on September 28, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Seriously, read this post. It’s spot-on in every single way.

Hunter Not The Hunted

So: recently, a young woman, Lucy-Anne Holmes, started a petition on Change.org aimed at getting The Sun to stop featuring topless Page 3 girls*. The Internet seems to have done its work well, because it’s been all over Twitter for days, with endorsement from such stalwarts as Caitlin Moran** & Graham Linehan, and is now claiming over 27,000 signatures. Many of the proponents of #nomorepage3 have made reference to feminism and the general well-being of women as justifications for the quasi-campaign. Even more baffling was when I saw sex educators, sex radicals and other generally sex-positive (by which I include sex-critical) folks endorsing it.

Therefore, I think there is an even greater need for countervailing opinions from the perspectives of feminists. Which, in this case, is me. Nobody ever said life was fair. But there are 2 things I’m not going to touch on: whether or not P3…

View original post 3,526 more words

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The Irish trade union movement throws sex workers under a bus

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is an umbrella organisation representing nearly all the active trade unions in Ireland, north and south. A full list of its member unions can be found here (by industry sector) or here (alphabetically).

ICTU has made a submission to the Irish government’s public consultation on the prostitution laws. As you can see here, where their submission is reproduced is full, most of it is just a cut-and-paste job of text sent to them by the Turn Off The Red Light campaign, which seeks the introduction of the Swedish model. But there is one part of ICTU’s original contribution which I found remarkable. A few paragraphs down the submission cites – clearly for the purpose of endorsing – the view of the Technical, Electrical & Engineering Union‘s General Secretary that

prostitution could not be considered “work”

ICTU didn’t invent this view, of course. But it strikes me as taking on a much graver significance when held by trade unionists than by, say, radical feminists or religious puritans. Because the corollary of prostitution not being work is, of course, that the people engaged in it aren’t workers – and are therefore not entitled to the rights that trade unions (theoretically) exist to defend. Effectively, what they’re saying to sex workers who want those rights is: piss off, and call us when you’ve found a real job.

This position puts ICTU at odds with the International Labour Organization, to which it is of course affiliated. While the ILO takes an officially neutral stance on the legal status of sex work, it has made abundantly clear that it recognises the sex industry as a de facto economic sector, and people who sell sex as engaging in a form of labour. In its groundbreaking 1998 report The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia, for example, editor Lin Lean Lim proposes that

For those adult individuals who freely choose sex work, the policy concerns should focus on improving their working conditions and social protection, and ensuring that they are entitled to the same labour rights and benefits as other workers.

The international standards developed by the ILO also reflect this position – albeit impliedly rather than explicitly, in their frequent reference to “all branches of economic activity” (my emphasis). The 1981 Occupational Safety and Health Convention is an example.

And what about the jurisdictions which have actually incorporated those standards into their own laws around sex work, such as New Zealand?

Abel, Fitzgerald and Brunton, “The Impact of the Prostitution Reform Act on the Health and Safety of Sex Workers” (2007)

The phenomenal figures in the last three rows of that table are the consequence of legislation which was expressly designed to treat sex work as work – legislation, in other words, designed to do exactly what ICTU says the law shouldn’t do. And thus ICTU, which is a trade union body hence theoretically a workers’ rights organisation, would reject a framework agreed to be rights-protective by over 90% of the workers operating within it, because they don’t consider them “workers” to begin with. ICTU policy would take those rights away from them.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a parallel to this extraordinary situation, and I’m honestly stymied. Even considering the obvious context – disapproval of prostitution as a matter of principle – I can’t think of another sector in which the “solution” would involve the wholesale rejection of labour rights for those involved. I cut my political teeth in anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigning, and I don’t recall anything remotely comparable to this. We may have wanted to decommission the bases and power plants but we never said labour law shouldn’t apply to people working at them.

Nor can ICTU’s position be justified on the basis that sex work isn’t really a choice. The term “work” may be deemed inappropriate for actual forced labour, the labour of someone who is literally enslaved – but ICTU, like all but the most fanatical fringes of the anti-sex work movement, don’t seem to think that most in the sex trade fall into this category. Instead, their submission refers to the “poverty, past history of abuse or limited life choices” that push people into prostitution. But ICTU don’t see it as “not work” when poverty and limited options push people into unappealing jobs outside the sex sector – and they would never dream of opposing legislation to give those workers labour rights.

In some respects, this betrayal isn’t really a surprise: the Irish trade union movement has a long history of selling out Irish workers, especially those at the margins. (They also have a history of an undemocratic, top-down style of leadership which seems to be reflected here as well: nobody I know in any of the ICTU-affiliated unions was asked for their opinion of this submission before it went in.) But summarily excluding a whole sector of the economy from their remit, and refusing to defend the labour rights of the (particularly vulnerable) people dependent on it? That’s a new low for them, and it’s a shocking one.

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The Oslo report on violence against sex workers

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

[Hi, Feminist Current readers! Please see this response to the piece that brought you here.]

A couple years ago, as many readers will know, the Swedish government commissioned a report into the outworking of that country’s sex purchase ban. The so-called Skårhed report had numerous flaws which have been dissected elsewhere, such as terms of reference which explicitly precluded repeal of the law (“One starting point of our work has been that the purchase of sexual services is to remain criminalized”), and the fact that only seven active sex workers participated in the study and their views were dismissed anyway. Nonetheless, the law’s advocates repeatedly point to the report as if its official status rendered it ipso facto a definitive statement about the law’s impact – so I’m sure they’ll be the first to latch onto the new report commissioned by the City of Oslo, right?

Well, maybe not. For one thing, the Norwegians haven’t been as quick to have it translated as the Swedes were, although there’s a brief English-language article about it here. From that headline you’ll guess the other reason this report won’t be trumpeted by the same people who took the Swedish report as gospel: because its own findings, based on questionnaires completed by 123 active sex workers as well as interviews with police and social services, paint a decidedly more negative picture than Anna Skårhed’s.

I’m not going to get into the statistics in the Oslo report, first because (as I’ve often said) I think figures are inherently problematic in this field, and there are some methodological limitations which call for caution in interpreting the findings. It’s important to note that the authors themselves state, on page 54, that

This data does not explain whether the high incidence of violence and the vulnerability that women in prostitution experience are due to the criminalization of buying sex or other factors.

So it’s unsafe to conclude from these statistics that the law has led to more violence against sex workers. It is, however, entirely safe to state that the evidence undermines claims that the law somehow protects sex workers, either by putting manners on their clients or improving their relations with police. In fact, on page 51 the report says:

[A] 2008 report noted the possibility that the criminalization of clients can be something that protects women, they can threaten customers who behave badly, or want to break the contract, to report sex buyers to police (Tveit and Skilbrei 2008:113). Nothing in the surveys we have conducted among women and assistance services suggests that criminalization could protect women against customer violence

Since this is one of the major arguments put forward by the law’s supporters, it is extremely relevant to the debate if neither sex workers nor their support services have found it to actually have that effect.

Based on interviews with police and support services, the report identifies a number of grounds on which sex workers may now be more vulnerable to client violence. Many of these, we’ve heard before:

Another trend is that the customer base has changed in that there are fewer “good” customers than before. “Good” clients refers to men who seek out women to buy sexual services, you pay the agreed price and adhere to the agreement. These are customers who are often the typical “man in the street.” With criminalization many people believe that fewer of these types of men are buying sexual services, because this client group often consists of law-abiding citizens. They refrain from buying sex now because of the new law. These customers are known as the easiest to operate.

A reduction in the number of “bad” customers is not reported, however, from either the police or other assistance. The term “bad” customers is used about customers who do not adhere to the agreement, try to push the prices, will not have sex with a condom, show lack of respect for women by being derogatory, violent/ threatening, intoxicated, mentally unstable/ill or who attend the women with the motive to violate them – not just to buy sexual services.

The consequence of the reduction in the number of customers in total, and that there are fewer “good” customers while the number of “bad” customers remains constant, is that the “bad” customers make up a larger portion of our customer base to more women than ever before. This means that although the number of “bad” customers has not necessarily increased, sales of sexual services have become more dependent on this particular group because the earnings base from the “good” customers is reduced. (page 38)

Meanwhile, for the (mostly Thai) women selling sex out of massage parlours,

there are reports that several have stopped prostitution activities in the establishments, for fear that the business shall be identified by the police. They now include agreements in the selling of sex at massage establishments, to meet the customer at a later stage in his own apartment for the implementation of the sexual services. (page 40)

Clearly, this poses a risk to the sex worker sent off to the client’s apartment. The latter page refers also to the “individualisation” of prostitution, in which

the community of women who sell sex has been reduced… Prostitution is not something we do together in selling sex from the same street corner/flat/establishment, but which is an isolated and personal project.

And with that goes the safety-in-numbers effect. Page 41 cites one potential positive of this individualisation, namely

Police believe this has meant that women are less vulnerable to traffickers because it is harder for traffickers to organize prostitution.

However, it goes on immediately to say:

Nevertheless, the police believe that the women in many ways are more vulnerable to other actors, such as customers, because women are more often alone in contact with them.

It then continues on a familiar theme:

In street prostitution, services reported that the time pressure to conclude an agreement with the customer has increased considerably since criminalization. Customers are more stressed because they fear that the police will find them, making contact on the street need to be done quickly and to get away from the area quickly. For many women this poses major challenges in contact with the customer because it is difficult to achieve a clear agreement with the customer about the price, sexual favors, place of execution and condom use before they must be off with the customer. The agreements are made only when one has come to a place that is “safer” for the client, such as in a hotel room, in a vehicle or in one of the parties’ apartment.

So when buyers are criminalised, it seems, there’s an inverse relationship between their safety and the seller’s – and his is paramount in the transaction.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that sex workers may now be more vulnerable to riskier sexual practices:

As the customer base has been somewhat reduced … several support services also report that women have had to lower the requirements they have for customers. Many women have previously had clear demands on the clients they take, nationality, substance abuse, mental health/client’s appearance are examples. The women also have other standards that were absolute, the sexual services they sell/don’t sell, how they conduct the sale, the number of customers they take the at same time, the price they take and the use of condoms. More services believe that women have been forced to lower their original demand to get clients and earn the money they need. Whether this has led to increased violence and increased rates of infection of sexually transmitted infections, it is difficult for aid services to consider, but it seems like there is a broad consensus among aid services that the women feel more vulnerable, more at risk and that they have less control of themselves in relation to the customer than before – just because they have had to lower their demands. (page 41)

This is what is known as a “buyer’s market”, where

customers to a greater extent than in the past may set the terms for the sexual services they want to buy, price, where the prostitution act shall be implemented and condom use. (page 38)

Another area in which sex workers are reported to have less control is in arranging their accommodation. This is because of an ongoing police operation, which carries the incredible name “Husløs” (homeless), aimed at enforcing the laws against indoor prostitution. Page 39 explains that this operation

means that the police notify owners of apartments / offices / hotels where prostitution is found that they will charged with pimping, if the tenancy is not terminated

As a consequence,

the rental market has become narrower for women in prostitution – both in terms of rental apartments to live in and in relation to operating a massage establishment. Prostitution support services report that according to the women, at times it has been difficult to find space for a massage establishment, because landlords will not rent apartments / rooms for people from ethnic groups associated with prostitution.

One wonders how many non-sex workers from those ethnic groups are also affected by this law. The result is that rather than being able to run their own establishment,

some women have had to get help from a Norwegian person to rent a room/studio in his name

… which means that rather than preventing dependency relationships, the law in this respect may actually encourage them. Page 39 reports a similar trend for drug-using street workers:

Among the addicts, women who still sell sex have many modified methods of how they come into contact with customers. Most aid services find that women are included in more long-term relationships with men who are referred to as “friends”, “boyfriends”, “uncles” or acquaintances. These are men they keep in touch with over the phone and that they are with for long periods, it can be about hours, days or weeks. They have sex with men in exchange for the men supplying them with drugs, money and other necessities. Many of the aid services say they feel women are very vulnerable in these relationships. The women are very dependent on the few customers they have.

Operation “Homeless” (I’m still utterly gobsmacked they call it that) also helps to explain why sex workers are reluctant to report violence to police. As page 42 notes:

Few women in the indoor sector contact the police when there is violence in the establishment or the apartment they work in because they fear that they will affected by operation “Homeless”, report aid services.

And then there’s my usual bugbear, the use of “anti-prostitution” laws as an immigration control measure. Page 37 states,

In relation to the foreign people who sell sexual services, police checks for valid identity and residence papers have soared.

On the next page,

The increase in immigration control has led to a strong presence of police in parts of the foreign prostitution environment and more are taken from Norway, while the use of various provisions of the order has resulted in more fines and being expelled for a period from various downtown areas.

The increased control of the market has meant that many of those who sell sex feel they have been criminalized. This is despite the fact that legislation has not changed in relation to those who sell sexual services. Both the police and aid services report on this trend.

Many of the aid services also report that police are no longer perceived by women as an ally they can turn to when they have been the victim of a crime because they fear that they will be checked for other conditions while in contact with the police.

This is an entirely predictable consequence of a crackdown on a market with many undocumented immigrants – and yet pro-criminalisation advocates still claim that their law will make sex workers more comfortable with police. Why in the world is this so hard for them to understand?

Notwithstanding my suspicion of figures, there is one in this report I think is worth highlighting (the usual caveats apply). On page 37 there is a reference to a study published in 2008, just before the law against buying sex took effect, in which sex workers were asked whether they thought the law would have an impact on their vulnerability to violence. 74% said yes, and of these, 90% said they would be more exposed – citing many of the same reasons already discussed here. Even accounting for any methodological weaknesses in that study, there were clearly significant concerns among sex workers as to what the law might mean for them. Why were those concerns ignored?

Page 41 gives a possible answer to that question: namely, that sex workers themselves were conceptualised as the problem that the law would address. Never mind that feminist stuff in Sweden, here it was seen as a public order issue and a highly racialised one at that:

Several support services, particularly prostitution services, report that in recent years there has been a shift in how the outside world reviews and relates to women in prostitution. This tendency can be traced back to 2006/2007 when the Nigerian women took the street prostitution market in Norway and started to sell sex in new and visible public areas. The debate often revolved around that these women acted inappropriately and immorally. Women in prostitution became more and more often referred to as disruptive and unwelcome, than as people in difficult circumstances. This focus was very clear in the debate prior to the criminalization of buying sex.

Unsurprisingly, the push for criminalisation has increased the stigma faced by sex workers:

The services reported that the direction the prostitution debate took in advance of and in connection with the ban has had a major impact on how “the man in the street” looks at women who sell sex, and they hear more women share experiences where they are harassed by strangers in public places than before.

In recent years, prostitution initiatives regularly received reports of people who attend the prostitution district of Oslo and harass women. The episodes that have been described, for example, are that individuals seek out prostitutes to shout abuse, throw things at women and behave rudely to them.

The Oslo report doesn’t address the key question in the Skårhed report, namely, whether the ban has reduced the amount of prostitution. This article cites a separate report which does; I’ll probably look at that at some future date. It’s pretty clear, though, that whatever about the statistics, the perception among those closest to the action – sex workers, their support services and the police – is that conditions are pretty rotten for those on the game in Norway’s capital and largest city. “The man in the street” in Oslo may not care about them, but for those who do or who claim to do so, there really can be no excuse for ignoring the very strong warning signals in this report and focusing immediately on how to improve these conditions – even if it means taking the foot off the End Demand train for a while.

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New edition of Look Left out now

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Just a short announcement that the new Look Left is out now, featuring a piece by yours truly on the Swedish sex trade law (along with an opposing view). For a list of places to buy it, click here.

ETA: You can now read a PDF of my article here.

It’s also got the following articles:

* Another Europe is Possible
* Interview with Mandate General Secretary John Douglas
* Michael Taft on the possibilities for building a progressive future
* Conor McCabe on the myth of NAMA’s ghost estates
* Gavin Titley on the media’s reporting of the economic crisis
* The Price of Corruption
* Belfast: Divided by Walls, United by Poverty
* The politics of the Pogues
* Brian Hanley on Frank Ryan’s Street Fighting Years
* Lauren Arrington on Delia Larkin and the Irish Women Workers’ Union
* What Now for the ULA?
* Egypt’s Permanent Revolution?
* Stormont’s Policies a Recipe for Poverty

Well worth the €2. Please check it out. And thanks to the editors for inviting me to contribute.

Is the legality of buying sex in Ireland a “loophole”?

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

More and more lately, I’ve been hearing advocates of a sex purchase ban in Ireland claim that it is a “loophole” in Irish law that makes it legal to buy sex. This letter in today’s Sunday Independent is an example.

The law governing prostitution in Ireland is the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993, which makes it an offence to solicit in public (whether as buyer or seller) for the purposes of prostitution. The Act does not, as that letter notes, make the purchase (or sale) of sex per se illegal.

But is that a loophole?

The word “loophole” implies that when the law was drafted, legislators unintentionally left an aspect of the subject matter uncovered, thereby leaving a particular action legal that was not meant to be left legal. Or as Wikipedia defines it:

A loophole is an ambiguity in a system, such as a law or security, which can be used to circumvent or otherwise avoid the intent, implied or explicitly stated, of the system.

Which means that the absence of a prohibition on buying sex can only be a loophole if the law was actually intended to outlaw the purchase of sex, but was drafted in such a way as to inadvertently fail to do so.

As it happens, Irish parliamentary debates are online and so it’s quite easy to see exactly what the intent of a law was. And here we see the then-Minister for Justice, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who introduced the bill, explaining its purpose to the Seanad (Senate):

I have explained in both Houses that prostitution is not illegal. What transpires in private between consenting adults is no business of the criminal law. The law must be concerned with the nuisance and annoyance caused by the public face of prostitution which is, in effect, soliciting, importuning or loitering for the purposes of prostitution.

This really couldn’t be any clearer. There was absolutely no intention in the bill to make the exchange of sex for money illegal, for either party, so long as it takes place between consenting adults behind closed doors. There was neither explicit nor implicit intention; there is no ambiguity. There is no “loophole”.

I suspect that pro-criminalisation advocates know this, and that their use of the word “loophole” is simply a discursive strategy aimed at portraying their proposal as a modest one. It seems to be a reaction to the plan of the current Minister for Justice for a consultation process on whether and how to reform our prostitution laws. By portraying their proposal as the tightening of a loophole rather than an actual policy change, they imply that there really isn’t a need for a consultation process at all, and if it has to go ahead, it should be merely a formality to get over and done with quickly.

It’s a clever enough strategy, but one fundamentally grounded in untruth.

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Human trafficking in Ireland, part 2 (and about those brothel raids)

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

In the comments to this post a few weeks ago, where I looked at the Irish government’s latest human trafficking report, a reader pointed me to the text of a presentation given recently by Detective Superintendent Noel Clarke of the Garda Síochána (Irish police)’s Human Trafficking Unit. I promised to give it a post of its own, which I meant to do last weekend, but something else intervened. Which turned out to be just as well, because in the meantime we’ve had the island-wide brothel raids which I referred to in this post – and what we’ve learned from those raids ties in very neatly with the contents of the presentation.

Much of Clarke’s statement is bland operational stuff but a couple points drew my attention. The first is his reference to the administrative status available to trafficked persons:

In the cases where the potential victim was not legally in the State and there were reasonable grounds to suspect that crime had occurred they were granted a Recovery and Reflection period and a subsequent Temporary Residence Permission… In 2011 only one of the 57 potential victims did not have a permission to be in the State and that individual was granted a Recovery & Reflection period and a subsequent Temporary Residence Permission.

This underscores what I said in the earlier post about the status serving as an anti-deportation measure, hence not being applied to persons who already have some kind of protection against deportation. But as you can see from the stats in that post, that status is “asylum seeker” for the majority of persons reported. And around 95% of asylum seekers in Ireland will lose their protection against deportation once their claims have been determined (that’s the approximate rejection rate). The Department of Justice gives the impression (paragraph 10) that the administrative arrangements will kick in automatically for identified trafficking victims should their other permission expire, but that’s not what actually happens: instead, failed asylum seekers who have been trafficked must ask for recognition under the arrangements, as a last-ditch effort to avoid deportation, at precisely the time when their immigration status is most precarious. Which is an awfully cruel procedural hoop to put vulnerable people through. It’s one of only several reasons why the arrangements are woefully inadequate for the people they are meant to assist, but that’s a subject for another post.

Another interesting thing in the presentation is that Clarke says:

The one significant trend emerging from the data is that in approximately two-thirds of the cases and after a detailed investigation no evidence of human trafficking has been disclosed.

Or to read it the other way around, only about one-third of the cases that are reported to the Gardaí as involving human trafficking actually do involve human trafficking. This is not too far from my interpretation of the 2011 data as showing only 14 confirmed cases out of 57 reported (that’s actually around one quarter, but the difference between a third of 57 and a quarter of 57 is only five people).

And that brings us neatly to last week’s brothel raids, which for all the hoopla seem to have been something of a damp squib as an anti-trafficking operation. To the best of my knowledge, there are no reports that any trafficking victims were found in this jurisdiction, though apparently three were found in the North (bearing in mind, however, the much broader offence of trafficking there). And according to this piece in today’s Sunday Independent,

Senior sources said that all the young women who were detained or questioned said they were working in the sex trade here voluntarily…Gardai disagree with claims by Catholic and feminist groups that there are high levels of human trafficking involved in Ireland’s sex trade.

Now, there should always be a health warning attached to statements attributed to anonymous “senior sources”. But in this case we have a named source saying pretty much the same thing. To return to that Noel Clarke presentation about the data in the Department of Justice report:

we are of the view that is it an accurate portrayal of the extent and nature of the problem in Ireland.

And if it is an accurate portrayal, then there aren’t high levels of human trafficking involved in Ireland’s sex trade because at most there were 14-19 victims last year while according to the pro-criminalisation lobby themselves there are over 1000 women in the Irish sex industry. Less than 2% is not a high level by any measure.

These kinds of figures are unreliable, of course; I’m always the first to say that. Undoubtedly there are cases that have gone undetected. But when even a police operation of last week’s scale fails to turn up evidence of a large number of victims, the burden of proof can’t keep being put on the side of the sceptics. It’s all well and good pointing out that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence but as justification for a potential legal change with significant consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods, it’s nowhere near good enough.

One final thing I want to address about the raids is the claim that police were not targetting the women selling sex. That is patently not true for the North, where three Polish sex workers have been prosecuted despite acknowledgement from all sides that there was no trafficking or pimping involved. There don’t seem to have been any arrests of sex workers in the South (despite the admission by Gardaí, in this piece again, that it is usually sex workers rather than pimps who face brothel-keeping charges), but look at what this article says:

An unknown number of prostitutes were spoken to by gardaí and their immigration details were checked. They will not face prosecution but may become witnesses.

All those congratulating the Gardaí for “not going after the women” seem to have missed that little detail emphasised above. If they were truly “not going after” them, why would they need to check their immigration status? What exactly do supporters of these raids think the Gardaí are going to do with the knowledge gleaned from those checks? In a country where even trafficking victims from outside the EU aren’t safe from eventual deportation, you can be damn sure that migrant sex workers won’t be; at best, they may be kept around long enough to serve as witnesses (if they don’t make themselves disappear before then). An undocumented person has more to fear from the police than prosecution alone. That’s something criminalisation advocates who think the Swedish model would turn sex workers and police into BFFs really need to get their heads around.

On RTÉ’s Prime Time last Thursday, Paul Maguire, the reporter whose February “exposé” of the online industry arguably set the stage for these raids, queried whether they’ve had any effect. He pointed out that the number of escort ads the day after the raids was actually higher than it was the day before. But why would the number go down? After all, there were as many women struggling to pay their bills the day after as the day before. There were as many migrants without employment permission the day after as the day before. And for those can truly be said to be in the business by choice – the so-called happy hookers – well, they weren’t the raids’ target anyway, were they?

None of the above means I don’t think there is exploitation in the Irish sex industry, or that it shouldn’t be investigated. But it is legitimate to query whether the outcome of this particular operation justified its considerable cost, and to ask whether more could have been achieved with less heavy-handed tactics. And if the professed concern for the women is genuine, then we need also ask about the impact of the raids on them. It simply cannot be assumed that they’d welcome such interventions with the same enthusiasm their would-be rescuers do. Particularly if, as the evidence we have suggests, such a small percentage of them actually need rescuing in the first place.

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Quick note on last night’s Vincent Browne

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

In the wake of a massive brothel raid police operation, the Vincent Browne show last night debated the issue of prostitution in Ireland. If you missed it a playback should be available soon here.

I don’t have too much to say about it but there are a couple points made by the anti-sex work speakers that I want to address. First, in response to a viewer’s claim that the rape rate in Sweden has skyrocketed since the sex purchase ban was introduced, Susan McKay of the National Women’s Council flatly denied that this was true and said that crime has generally gone down in Sweden.

The official statistics on reported offences in Sweden are here. I’ve taken a screenshot of the relevant time period (click on it to enlarge):

As you can see, the viewer was correct: the reported rape rate has gone up significantly since the sex purchase ban was introduced. Sarah Benson of Ruhama, another panelist, was correct to point out that Sweden broadened its definition during the period – in 2005, I believe, interestingly the same year that the Netherlands broadened their definition of trafficking– and in any event, these are only reported rapes so it’s impossible to know for sure whether the number of actual rapes has increased. And I’m sceptical of the claim of any link between legality of prostitution and rape in the first place, not least because there is no evidence that making it illegal to buy sex actually stops men from doing so. So I am not posting these statistics to make a claim that the rape rate has increased because of the law. My point is that Susan McKay responded to the allegation by not only flatly denying it but making a further claim about the general crime rate which, as you can see from those stats, is also wildly off the mark. With the exception of theft offences, it is absolutely, 100% untrue that crime rates have decreased since the law was introduced, and its advocates really need to be hauled over the coals for their willingness to make such breathtakingly false claims. (I’ll give McKay the benefit of the doubt that she may have been merely repeating something she was told since, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere, the Swedish authorities routinely fudge the truth around the law’s effects.)

The other thing I wanted to highlight was Sarah Benson’s assertion, in response to the point that Teresa Whitaker of the Sex Workers Alliance made about the UNAIDS Advisory Group on HIV and Sex Work report, that HIV is not an issue for Irish sex workers. Yes, you read that correctly, HIV is not an issue – because the HIV rate is so low, except among injecting drug users, who apparently don’t count.

I frankly find it astonishing that anyone who works with sex workers should dismiss the relevance of HIV – and it’s worth pointing to this document on the Ruhama website in which Benson says the opposite:

Women and children will contract sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. This does not magically happen. Buyers are the source of infection and transmit it to women…

But the other point to be made here, and my tweet to this effect was read by Vincent Browne but ignored by the panel, is that the law they are advocating has the potential to make HIV much more of an issue. As I wrote about here and here, Norwegian health services are already seeing a rise in other STIs since the sex purchase ban was introduced, which they attribute to a greater reluctance to use condoms: where sex sellers are struggling to make a living because their clients have gone elsewhere, they are more vulnerable to demands for unprotected sex. It’s not rocket science. So even if Benson was correct that HIV isn’t an issue for Irish sex workers now, there’s a very good chance it will be if she gets her way on the law. Indeed, that’s pretty much the point the UNAIDS Advisory Group Report makes.

Finally, I look forward to a future Vincent Browne episode featuring the voices of actual sex workers. We need to remember that they are not, as Benson also (remarkably) put it, “burgers” but people with their own views on what they do and what the law should do about it. We need to create an environment where they can speak out and not only contribute to but actually shape the debate, which is, after all, about their lives and not ours. I’ll close here by linking to the Stories From Behind The Red Light blog, which is run by actual Irish-based sex workers. They are the people who should have been up on that panel last night.

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On Labour Women’s Statement on the EU Fiscal Treaty

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Earlier this month, several female elected representatives of the Labour Party held a press conference and issued a statement calling for a Yes vote in Thursday’s EU Fiscal Treaty referendum. Their message was aimed at women, and Mairead Enright has a good piece here pointing out the tired essentialism in their appeal.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was a poster put up by the Yes side during one of the last referendum campaigns:

I never saw the “Ireland for Europe” group’s explanation of what they meant by this slogan – safer from what? – but the message was pretty clear. It was written in the first person singular, “I” rather than “We”, indicating personal and not collective safety. It featured a woman – can you imagine it featuring a man? – of an age where personal safety is likely to be a matter of significant concern; she is past the fearlessness of youth, but is neither so old that voters see her age before her gender, nor too young for senior women to identify with. In short, she is Everywoman, with the exception only of those women young enough to be targeted in the “young people” category. While the Yes campaign generally traded on fear, it was a peculiarly gendered, intimate type of fear that this poster aimed at instilling.

The Labour Women statement of the current campaign isn’t quite so brazen, but there is still a current of intimate fear running through it. Note, again, the reference to women’s safety in their support for the Treaty:

Joan Burton opened by reminding us that for women a YES vote is the safest option.

There is very little in the statement about what the Treaty will actually do to improve women’s lives – in fact, one of the speakers openly admits to the lack of direct positive consequences of a Yes – but a lot about what might happen if we don’t pass it, which Labour Women threaten could amount to no less than “devastation” for “you and your family”.

As Enright’s post shows, the statement makes a lot of suggestions as to why a Yes vote should appeal to our womanly nature. But it gives only one real concrete reason to vote for it: to get access to European Stability Mechanism funding. Without this funding, it is implied, social welfare will have to be cut, gender inequality will worsen, poverty will increase. Not mentioned is the fact that the Treaty also requires a commitment to the same austerity measures that have already led to social welfare being cut, gender inequality worsening and poverty increasing. Measures which Labour themselves have been implementing in government, through the very woman (Joan Burton, the Social Protection Minister) who opened this press conference.

Labour, of course, were firmly opposed to austerity while in opposition. In her response to the final budget of the previous government, Minister Burton said:

There is enough austerity in today’s announcement by the Minister, Deputy Lenihan, to make even the most ardent Tea Party fan grin in delight. There is pain for the poor, money for the rich, particularly for the bankers, and the rolling back of the State.
…
What has all the austerity and deflation done for us as a country so far? In more than two and quarter years of austerity, unemployment has risen from 4% to 14%, which is 435,000 people. Austerity has slashed growth, it has killed consumer confidence and turned us into a nation who are busy paying down debt or saving – anything but spending.
…
We all know about the famous three Rs that are the bedrock of early education. There is another set of three Rs that became the bedrock of economic recovery in the post-Depression era and formed the basis of the post-war politics in Europe, irrespective of the country or party in power. These three Rs are reflation, redistribution and reform. If the Labour Party is in Government after the next election, reflation, redistribution and reform will be what its participation in government will be about.

During the election campaign, plenty more promises like that were made by Labour, and all of them were broken. The three Rs we’ve got from this government have been recession, redundancies and repossessions. When asked to explain this about-face, Labour often responds by blaming the EU-ECB-IMF Troika. Burton again:

I am conscious that the reforms which are on the table may be painful for some in the short-term.

But we are constrained in what we can achieve by the fact that we are living on borrowed money, borrowed money which comes with many conditions attached.

In other words, having loaned Ireland the money it needs to run itself, the IMF and its Troika partners are also dictating how it is spent. The internal Labour line, or so I’ve been told by a party apparatchik, is that the Troika has people with veto power monitoring every government department. Now either that’s not actually true and the Labour/Fine Gael government are implementing these measures of their own accord, or Ireland is part of what can only be deemed an extremely unhealthy relationship of financial dependence, in which the other party controls all the purse strings.

The Labour Women statement, incredibly, implies that the solution to the problems created by this financial dependence is to sign up to more of it. The statement admits that the Treaty won’t bring us jobs, investment and growth, but since Ireland can’t access ESM funds without it, we

depend on this treaty to be passed to have a more secure future

At the end of the day, this is really what it’s all about: “security” is equated with “access to [someone else’s] money”. And to be entirely dependent on someone else’s money but have little control over what we can do with it, that’s not a bad thing. To be making huge sacrifices in a relationship that we’re not getting anything else out of – including things that we really need – that’s not a bad thing either. Forget things like autonomy, self-fulfilment and self-determination; as long as we have that security in our lives, that’s all that matters.

What kind of message does that send to women?

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“There was no lack of buyers” – Swedish sex trafficking trial concludes

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

It may have escaped your notice if you rely on what the Swedes tell other countries about their sex trafficking problem, but last week several men were convicted for what Swedish prosecutors have called one of the largest trafficking rings of its kind ever uncovered in that country. It involved Romanian women who were brought to Sweden, some of them on the pretence of working in legal industries, and forced to sell sex in various Gothenburg arenas. You can read more about it here, here and here.

I won’t cite all the tragedy porn in those links (though I have no doubt supporters of the Swedish model would, if it had happened in a country where buying sex was legal), but there are a couple things I think are worth drawing attention to. The first is the quote in the title of this post, which comes from the third link. That article goes on to report one of the women’s testimony that she had seven or eight customers on her very first night. This doesn’t say much for the supposed deterrent effect of the sex purchase ban.

The second is the breakdown of ages (in the final link) of the men convicted of buying sex from these women: 36% were born in the 1960s, 21% in the 1970s and 30% in the 1980s. The other 13% aren’t accounted for except to say that the oldest was 76 and the youngest 17. So nearly a third, and perhaps slightly over that, were teenagers when the ban was introduced in 1999: further evidence (as I discussed here) that it hasn’t had the normative effect it was supposed to have on younger men.

The 17-year-old’s conviction is interesting for another reason. If Wikipedia (and all the other links I’ve found by Googling) is correct, Sweden’s age of majority is 18, which means that he is legally still a child. There’s nothing unusual about minors being convicted of crimes, of course, but the way that prostitution is conceptualised in Sweden does make this rather remarkable. The ideology underlying the sex purchase ban is that women cannot choose to sell sex; evidently, however, Swedish law considers that male children (at least of a certain age) can choose to buy it. In other words, when it comes to trading sex for money, adult women are less competent than male children. Could there be any clearer illustration of how this law infantilises women?

(It’s true that at least some of the women involved in this ring didn’t actually choose to sell sex, but the law doesn’t make a distinction between those who do and those who don’t. As far as I can tell from the various reports, the men were convicted for buying sex simpliciter, not for buying sex from trafficked persons, which does not appear to be a separate offence in Swedish law. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.)

Nor is this an isolated incident. Last month, the same journal carried a story about another “large scale sex trafficking ring”, involving an even greater number of women, in Stockholm. In fact, the Swedish-language paper Sydsvenska, discussing the Gothenburg trial, says that “Många” (many) human trafficking cases have been reported since the law was brought in. The law’s advocates, funnily enough, seem to leave that detail out of their propaganda.

Some of the other Swedish language reports have equally interesting comments. I tracked down the source of that client age survey, this Dagens Nyheter (Daily News) article, in which I found the following information about the Gothenburg sex trade (Google Translate C&P job, but you get the gist):

The two worst pimps were convicted of trafficking and the other four for aggravated procuring. But in the street sex trade going back to normal. “Moreover, there prostitution in more arenas than we can access,” says social worker Ms Malmström…

We have also attempted to examine the major internet sites and SMS sent and email to over 300 who sell sex on the net, says Ms Malmström, so the market is actually much larger.

This article in the Gothenburg Post states that the men convicted included a municipal councillor, a Premier Division footballer, and several directors and sales managers. It also reports the County Police Commissioner as saying human trafficking is “a business with huge income and relatively low risks”. Not quite what we’ve been told about Sweden being an unattractive market for traffickers, is it?

I could go on but I think I’ve made my point. The picture that advocates of the Swedish model are painting outside of Sweden is clearly very different to the reality inside Sweden. Furthermore, the Swedes don’t seem unaware that they still have significant issues with prostitution and sex trafficking – they just don’t want the rest of the world to know about it. And so, they send their spokespersons out to lobby for the sex purchase ban in other countries, by making claims that are directly contradicted by their own officials in their own media. And credulous moralists and anti-sex work feminists swallow it wholesale, no questions asked.

What’s the Swedish for “con job”?

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Posted in Migration, Sex work, Violence against women and tagged Criminalisation, Human trafficking, Sweden. Bookmark the permalink.